Kelly Evans

Summary

Information systems management executive with increasing responsibility within the financial managed services sector. High premium on customer satisfaction and feedback, coupled with a focus on building teams and processes to facilitate the delivery of both effective and efficient service operations experiences to customers.His current initiative involves implementing service management (ITIL/ITSM) best practices at Interactive Data 7ticks to further solidify the company's framework for increased global expansion and a broader range of services.

Work experience

Work experience

Aug 2010 - Present

Director, Service Operations

Promoted by the Senior Director of Technology Operations and charged with development and day-to-day operations of a Global Service Operations group to handle ~70% YOY growth. This highly technical, customer-oriented service organization is responsible for maintaining, monitoring, reporting on and resolving issues on a global ultra-low latency infrastructure over which some of the biggest financial institutions and latency-sensitive companies execute financial transactions. Selected Contributions:

Designed and implemented a customer call center with a 3-tiered, scalable support structure, resulting in reduced response and resolution times.

Increased customer support coverage to accommodate global infrastructure expansion to Toronto, Montreal, Tokyo, London, Chicago, New York and Frankfurt.

Performed detailed audits of all operational practices and developed a multi-faceted action plan to attain service excellence through improved processes.

Developed customer specific SOPs which were reviewed with customers prior to go live. The package included an overview of the individual customer's solution, policies, procedures, areas of responsibility, diagrams, incident handling scenarios, etc.

Developed an outage protocol for major incidents providing for a divide-and-conquer task force to execute assigned responsibilities in priority order when time to execution is critical.

Oct 2009 - Aug 2010

Director, Production Support & Operations

Advanced to a position of increased responsibility, accountable for global operations involving 6 countries, 19 data centers and 20 major long hauls through a complex environment connecting latency-sensitive clients to 36 different financial exchanges over a low latency infrastructure. Selected Contributions:

Improved service build quality and efficiency through build checklists, documentation and post-build testing.

Implemented knowledge base solutions to enable easy reference to tribal knowledge, resulting in an overall decrease in time to incident resolution.

Developed a "watchmen" team to handle incoming emails, tickets, calls and alerts, resulting in a significant improvement in customer responsiveness.

Streamlined previously disconnected support communication channels, emails and ticket comments to provide a significantly more accurate and up-to-date ticket history while simultaneously increasing the flexibility through which an engineer can post updates.

Recruited highly technical staff and extended support for 24/7 coverage.

Increased accuracy of time recording through improvements to time tracking system, resulting in increased revenue realized from clients.

Introduced the White Glove Program to service high-value clients and served on the company-wide task force.

Proposed and created documentation to support the creation of a client technical manager group.

Assisted with the creation and socialization of change management and served on the Change Advisory Board.

Provided employee and team direction using goals and regularly scheduled reviews, resulting in department improvement across multiple areas.

Dec 2008 - Oct 2009

Manager, Client Services

Requested by the Managing Director to return to Chicago to build and run 7ticks' managed services desk. Responsibilities included implementing, managing and supporting a buffet of customized services including networking, systems and trading applications. Selected Contributions:

Implemented daily mandatory "Start of Day" meeting with operations team to review all outstanding issues, next steps, resolutions and upcoming builds.

Created a release management procedure for upgrading trading software, resulting in improved version control and customer communication and decreased outages.

Designed an automated build system for Linux and Solaris deployments, resulting in a quicker delivery of service.

Developed service incident reporting to detail incident timelines, remedies and future steps as a mechanism to continually improve operational performance.

Implemented, configured and managed new phone system to enable feature sets including IVR, call routing and call acknowledgement, improving our ability to support our customers with a more flexible approach.

Apr 2005 - Dec 2008

Lead, Trading Systems Support & Operations

Chosen to support and operate a proprietary software trading infrastructure through which high-frequency, algorithmic electronic trades were executed. Interfaced with customers, vendors, exchanges, developers, traders and business stakeholders to ensure the best support experience. Selected Contributions:

Managed over 2,000 users across 6 environments.

Cultivated both team and personal habits to reinforce a high standard of support with a focus on communication.

Consulted with developers on improvements, automation opportunities and bugs based on customer feedback, requests and operator use of the system.

Created a troubleshooting document for issues that arose regularly to decrease resolution time.

Automated server build process, decreasing time to production and improving quality.

Performed integration testing with algorithmic customers.

Implemented development and UAT environments coupled with a version control mechanism further increasing quality of product upgrades.

Jun 2003 - Apr 2005

Developer / Systems Analyst / Systems Administrator

Charged with designing and developing a Customer Relationship Management System including calendar, contact, account, ticket and inventory management with customer access via a portal.The role grew to include email, DNS, database and systems implementation and support. Secondary responsibilities included rack, stack and cabling in the datacenter and onsite customer visits for consultation.

Jun 2001 - Nov 2002

Developer

Served on the technical team responsible for migrating 12 separate Customer Care, Service Provisioning and Billing systems into one. Successfully completed converting all systems within a 48 hour period, performed testing and resolved issues.

Apr 2000 - Jun 2001

Developer

Integral member of a two-person technical team, charged with collecting business requirements from lumber traders and developing a trading software application and transactional website. Involved with full life cycle from idea to design, implementation, testing, user acceptance and support.